For the Benson-Owens family, Leadership Austin is a family affair. Maurice Benson (Essential 20 – 1999) started the trend. His sister, Pamela Benson-Owens, joined him the following year as a curriculum adviser for the Essential program. Pam stayed on as a faculty member for Emerge…
Emilia “Emmy” Alcocer-Hill (Experience Austin 2014, Emerge 9 – 2015, Essential 40 – 2019) is one of only four people in the 40-year history of Leadership Austin to participate in all three of our core programs. Of those four people, Emmy is the only one…
Lauren Johnson (Essential 38 – 2017) first met Leadership Austin when she was performing with Conspire Theatre, a creative writing and performance ensemble for women who are currently incarcerated in Travis County or who have experienced incarceration. Her first performance was part of Arts and…
Kirk Watson (Essential 5 – 1984) finished his Leadership Austin program 35 years ago, but he is still impacted by the experience every day. He continues working on the issues he learned about in the class and collaborating with the people he met through his…
Every spring, Leadership Austin recognizes alumni and community leaders who are serving the region in exceptional ways, and who are committed to our core values of community trusteeship, inclusiveness, collaborative decision-making and personal responsibility. The Ascendant award is given to an alumnus who has graduated…
Add one Leadership Austin alumnus to your team and you gain new perspectives. Add several and you build a new culture. That’s what you’ll find at Bank of America. On Day 29 of 40 Stories in 40 Days, the Essential alumni who work for Bank…
Over the past 40 years, programming at Leadership Austin has evolved to meet the changing needs of our growing region. The Emerge program is a good example of this evolution. In order to fulfill our mission of developing a pipeline of leaders, we recognized the…
Over the past 40 years, Leadership Austin has focused on bringing together diverse perspectives while also maintaining civil, productive discourse in our programs. When we thought about who could help us talk about what this practice looks like in action, we immediately knew which alumni…